THE SAUCE

Some advice you hear once and forget. Some advice gets installed in you like an operating system.

This is the second kind.

Where it came from

I grew up in Santa Barbara, and at some point I met Damizza, Damion Young. If you don't know the name, look him up. He's a Santa Barbara kid who came up working in radio here at home, went on to run programming at Power 106 in Los Angeles, worked at Hot 97 in New York, and produced records with some of the biggest names in music, including Mariah Carey's "Crybaby" with Snoop Dogg. In 2000 he put out Where I Wanna Be, a compilation that landed on the Billboard charts.

So when a guy like that talks about how you get from nothing to something, you listen.

And from day one, Mizz gave us the sauce:

Consistency and repetition build familiarity.
Familiarity breeds relationships.
Relationships build trust.
Trust builds teams.
Teams win games.
Games won win championships.
It all leads to growth.

I'm not sure where he got it. If I had to guess, it came from his grandma, who was one of the most influential people I've ever been around. She was full of knowledge, she was everybody's grandma, and I have nothing but respect and admiration for her. Rest in peace, Grandma. A lot of what this essay is about came through her, one way or another.

It's a staircase, not a menu

The thing that makes this formula powerful is the order. Every step stands on the one before it. You can't skip to the top.

Consistency and repetition build familiarity. Show up. Then show up again. Same time, same energy, same standard. People don't notice you the first time. They notice you the fifth time, and they start to recognize you by the twentieth. (That's what the visual identity essay was really about: same look, same colors, over and over, until people know you on sight.)

Familiarity breeds relationships. Once people recognize you, they start to talk to you. The regular at the coffee shop. The person who keeps commenting on your posts. The client who asks for you by name. You can't have a relationship with a stranger, and nobody stays a stranger if you keep showing up.

Relationships build trust. Trust isn't something you can ask for. It's what's left over after a relationship has been tested a few times and held. You said you'd call back, and you did. You quoted a price, and you stuck to it. You messed up, and you owned it.

Trust builds teams. Nobody builds anything big alone. The people who trust you are the ones who'll work with you, refer you, invest in you, cover for you and ride with you when it gets hard. A team is just trust with a shared goal.

Teams win games. Individual talent wins moments. Teams win games. The best person in the room loses to a group that trusts each other almost every time.

Games won win championships. A championship isn't one big win. It's a lot of regular wins stacked up over a season. Small wins, consistently.

It all leads to growth. And notice where growth is: at the very end. Not the beginning. Growth is the result of the whole staircase, not a step you can buy your way onto.

Once you see it, you see it everywhere

After Mizz put this in my head, I started seeing it everywhere. In people's success stories and in their downfalls. In businesses. In the news. In politics. In sports, obviously.

The pattern is almost always the same. The people and businesses that last climbed the stairs in order. The ones that crash usually tried to skip a step.

• Skipping consistency. The business that posts every day for a week, then disappears for three months, and wonders why nobody remembers them.
• Skipping relationships. The company that treats customers like numbers, then acts shocked when those customers leave the second something better shows up. (I wrote a whole essay about watching that happen to Digg.)
• Skipping trust. The person who asks for the sale, the referral or the favor before they've earned it. Everybody can feel that.
• Skipping the team. The one who tries to do everything alone, burns out, and calls it bad luck.
• Chasing growth first. The most common one. Growth is the goal everybody wants, so they aim straight at it, and they skip every step that would have gotten them there.

The part I have to be honest about

I haven't always remembered the whole thing. Or the order. And it's cost me.

There have been times I wanted the championship without stacking the regular wins. Times I wanted the trust before I'd put in the consistency. Times I tried to grow before I'd built the team. Every time, the formula was sitting right there, and every time, skipping a step showed up later as the reason something didn't work.

That's the thing about the sauce. It doesn't care whether you agree with it. It just keeps being true.

But when you actually live it, in order, step by step, everything else starts falling into place. Clients come back. People refer you without you asking. The right people show up on your team. Growth stops being something you chase and starts being something that just happens.

How I use it now

Every time I start something new, a client, a project, a business idea, a post, I run it through the stairs:

1. Am I being consistent enough for anyone to recognize this?
2. Is that turning into actual relationships?
3. Have I done the things that earn trust, or just asked for it?
4. Who's on the team?
5. What are the small wins I can stack this week?

And then I stop worrying about growth, because growth is the last step, and it takes care of itself.

Shout outs

Shout out to the sauce. Shout out to Grandma, who I'm pretty sure was the original source. And shout out to Mizz for giving it to us from day one, and for always reminding us what it takes.

Consistency and repetition. That's where it starts. Every time.

— g